“Follow the money” is usually a good way to find out why things happen the way they do in government, but it’s a winding road and sometimes it leads nowhere.

That’s what the nonpartisan National Institute on Money in State Politics found in a report released Tuesday that compared the committee votes on the reauthorization of the Office of Consumer Counsel in the last session and the donations lawmakers received from the telecommunications industry.

“There wasn’t a very strong correlation,” said Peter Quist, spokesman for the institute.

The decision on whether to reauthorize Coloradans’ state watchdog over rates charged by electricity, gas and telecommunications providers went down to the final hours of the session on May 6. At issue was whether the agency should still maintain oversight of rates charged by phone companies.

Republicans, primarily, said the OCC shouldn’t bother with telecoms, which accounted for only about 5 percent of the office’s work. The legislature deregulated telecommunications in 2014, because with so many choices of where to get phone service, the open market, not the government, sets the prices. Democrats and consumer advocates said the OCC should maintain a role, because of 9-1-1 services and a future review of deregulation on the impact of deregulation.

In the end, House Democrats approved the Senate bill without telecommunications oversight in order to save the agency. Without doing that, the OCC would have reached its sunset on Wednesday, and gas and electricity oversight would have gone down with it.

“The near-death and limiting of OCC’s jurisdiction incentivized the Institute to look at contributions from industries impacted by OCC—utilities (electric and natural gas) and telecommunications—to current members of the legislature since 2004,” the Money in State Politics report begins.

What the report found is that some of the people who have received the most in donations from the industry didn’t do the industry’s bidding.

Democrat Max Tyler of Lakewood, chairman of the House Transportation and Energy Committee, which heard the bill, received $2,925 in donations from the telecom industry. But Tyler’s committee voted 7-6, along party lines, to add an amendment to the Senate bill that included the OCC’s oversight of phone companies. Vice-chairwoman Diane Mitsch Bush, a Democrat from Steamboat Springs, has received $2,200 in campaign donations, but she, too, voted against stripping telecom oversight from the agency.

Rep. Tracy Kraft-Tharp received the most of anybody on the committee, $4,450, but she also voted for keeping telecoms in the bill.

The Senate Business, Labor and Technology Committee voted 8-1 to advance the bill without the telecommunications piece. Sen. Rollie Heath, a Boulder Democrat, was the only no vote. He received $2,600 from the industry.

“This was an exercise to see if the votes lined up with the money,” Quist said. “In this case, they didn’t.”

Joey Bunch has been a reporter for 28 years, including the last 12 at The Denver Post. For various newspapers he has covered the environment, water issues, politics, civil rights, sports and the casino industry.